Legal actions against ‘Crossrail’ promoters, and Alistair Darling, MP, the Secretary of State for Transport [Plus]



By Muhammad Haque
2100 Hrs GMT London
Tuesday 21 March 2006

This is a very brief and ordinary summary of some of the grounds and reasons which we can use to support our many claims against the Secretary of State for Transport [Alistair Darling MP] and against the other ’public’ authorities and bodies and private individuals - including the chief executive post holders in those organisations and bodies at the relevant times who have acted illegally or unlawfully in their promotion of the Crossrail hole project.

I am writing this version in response to many queries received by Khoodeelaar over the past 26 months about how we could use the ‘legal system’ to stop the Crossrail attacks on our community. I will follow this introductory brief by examining some of the key defendants and their behaviour. I shall focus on some of the crucial Convention and compatibility issues in the course of this series.

For a start the list below should give a general view of what the legal actions may entail. I shall be revisiting, revising [etc] some parts of these articles as we progress over the next days and weeks.

1. Legal action – updated grounds against individual employees of Tower Hamlets Council and individual councillors based on statements they made in public about what they did or did not do about Crossrail hole plan

2. What are these legal actions that in fact can be taken to defend the community against Crossrail?

3. Answer: No action can be taken against the Crossrail as such about the actual Crossrail railway line as there is no such line in existence and operating at present. Most of the actions will be taken in civil courts. Criminal liabilities are possible but they will be relatively few, not because there have not been criminal offences committed by the promoters of the Crossrail attacks but because of the relative difficulties involved in bringing evidence acceptable to an average English law court.

4. My assumption here is that an English court [on the records] is most reluctant to find a state agent or official guilty of any offence against any ordinary citizen. This reluctance also applies to some extent to the English civil courts. But compared to the criminal courts, an English civil court is less brazen in its obstructive ness to applicants seeking ‘results’ against criminally active holders of public offices.

5. Actions can be taken about the various things that have been done, plans that have been agreed and the payments that have been made as part of the preparations for the building of a Crossrail line. The ‘things’ would include any money spent about any new structure or any installation of anything anywhere that has been done on the assumption of the operation of the Crossrail line [as the plan is so far as that plan is contained in or identifiable by reference to the relevant contents of the present Crossrail hole Bill.

6. Those things are varied and many. And those things affect many people.

7. The effects that can be included in court actions are unlimited and will be based on the facts of the effects.

8. The first fact to note is that although Tower Hamlets Council has not ‘granted a planning permission to Crossrail’ or the CLRL company that exist to implement the Crossrail line, it is the case that an undisclosed number of meetings between controlling group councillors on Tower Hamlets Council and Crossrail company employees took place at various times during the past 5 years.

9. The legal action programme will cover some of those meetings and the actual agreements that were made at those meetings or as resulting from the relevant meetings and contacts.

10. The liabilities of the prospective defendants in the court actions are linked with those.

11. They will – or depending on the claimants and other factors not yet fully examined, may – include the actual Crossrail line if it is built.

12. Claims on consequences of the promises made to get agreements for Crassrail will very much feature as central grounds for certain claims.

13. Claims will also be justified on constitutional law bases. Including the assertion made by Alistair Darling who presented the hybrid Crossrail Bill in the UK House of Commons and said that he was satisfied that the Bill was compatible with the Human rights conventions.

14. On that one, Alistair Darling uttered a very serious falsehood. And he can be sued personally for making an untruthful statement in Parliament. That he dressed it as a subjective opinion cannot excuse his illegality and dishonesty. He was in fact making an untruthful statement that affected the UK’s obligations under the Treaty. It also exposes the rank illegality that dominates the ‘business agenda’ on legislation being pursued by the Blair regime. That agenda is daily flouting EXISTING statutes and legal obligations domestically [that is, within the UK’s own jurisdictions]. Across the constitutional board.

15. He knows [or he ought to have known] as any rationally active reasonable person would have known, that his utterance was a patent lie. The contents of the Crossrail Bill, as it was presented to Parliament by Alistair Darling are so comprehensively contradictory of so many of the Human Rights Conventions that no self-respecting claimant to the ‘profession’ of law [Alistair Darling has been described by George Galloway as an honourable man – and I have already queried that that remark and put a question about that very ‘characterisation’ to Galloway whose response [or substantiation] I shall report as and when I receive it] would allow him to continue to be addressed as a ‘lawyer’. No lawyer, worth any description as a person who knows what the relevant laws are about, could have said what Alistair Darlings aid about the Crossrail hole Bill and its allegedly satisfying the Human Rights Conventions!

[To be continued]